Putting Burney in Her Place

Daughter of a renowned musicologist and a celebrated author in her own right, Frances Burney stood at the center of Britain's social, political, and cultural scene from her young adulthood well into old age. Yet despite Burney's apparently firm toehold in the elite circles of her time, her letters and journals detail her experiences with the threatened or very real loss of those deep relationships with people and places that fostered Burney's sense of who she was, what she was, and where she belonged. I argue that in these writings, Burney represents the trauma of insecurity over her place, particularly in three salient instances: her exposure as the author of Evelina, her position at Court attending Queen Charlotte, and her residence in France from 1802-1812, including the Hundred Days of Napoleon's return from exile on Elba and final defeat at the battle of Waterloo. Whether they were jotted down in haste or carefully crafted, the journals and letters describing these episodes recount Burney's forced estrangement from her familiar surroundings while also recording her attempts to shape her experiences in narrative forms that would mitigate their danger to herself. By detailing her alienation from anything resembling an established home and portraying her confinement and dislocation in increasingly unstable environments, Burney's writings articulate an emerging recognition of exile as endemic to contemporary life.